Wish you were here

SO HERE we are in Terror City watching the Test match in which Mr Andrew Caddick and Mr Robert Croft declined to play for England for fear of being blown to pieces by some Taliban rascals.

True, we are only some 400 miles south of where Mr Bin Laden is reckoned to be skulking and, admittedly, there is potential danger here. It is apparent at every roundabout on the drive in from our Chandigarh hotel where cars, lorries, motorcyclists with their ladies riding side-saddle, bike-propelled rickshaws and the odd bullock cart make a demonic charge to get round first.

Collisions are frequent, deaths unavoidable.

That confessed - though England's cricketers have a police escort to clear the way and a couple of former SAS hit-men aboard to strangle unwanted intruders - this place is certainly safer than my home town of London and I am ashamed to say I have proof of it.

Among us here is Henry Blofeld, the distinguished BBC radio commentator. In June this year, on the short stroll from his local pub to his home in Fulham, he was mugged and robbed. No-one has yet been apprehended.

Within 24 hours of arriving in Chandigarh, he received tidings that the same home had been forcibly entered and Pounds 20,000 worth of his wife's jewellery and other valuable artefacts stolen. Even more shamefully, the house had been trashed from top floor to basement.

Paradoxically, Mr Blofeld was actually prepared for, though not expecting, trouble here in India instead. Along with his fellow BBC commentators he was sent on a hostile environment course, again run by a former SAS heavy. The most valuable tip he received was never to sit over the wing of an aircraft which, of course, he promptly did. Unlike the regular BBC scorer Bill 'The Bearded Wonder' Frindall, who refused to come, Blofeld is not unduly concerned about the spectre of terrorism spreading to the Punjab, despite its proximity to Afghanistan.

It is a view entirely shared by Indian cricket administrators here, who were privately aghast at the prevarication by the many England players about coming to this Test series. 'Did they have the same fear about terrorist reprisals when Kosovo was being bombed?' asked I.S. Bindra, former president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India. 'Did they really think trouble was going to be worse here than some of the outrages the IRA have committed on mainland Britain?' England's reputation for the stiff upper lip has definitely taken a battering, though it must be acknowledged that Hindu fatalism about death - sudden, violent or natural - does make it more difficult for Indians to comprehend what they see as cowardice.

For example, the mass circulation Indian Express devoted all of nine paragraphs on an inside page to the story that 25 people had died and a further 70 were critically ill in hospiaccreditationtal after drinking moonshine hooch concocted from industrial waste. Its front-page lead concerned the delicate diplomacy between the BCCI and the International Cricket Council to allow this crisis-ridden Test match to be played at all, a matter to which I shall return in a moment.

Meanwhile, Bindra, the man behind the magnificent 70,000-seat stadium with its eloquent gymkhana club culture here, has turned cartwheels to make England's team and media feel welcome, pampered and, above all, safe. It is not quite the ring-of-steel environment that is so popular with the tabloid Press, but there are guards along every hotel corridor and without the right you will go nowhere.

Actually, the metal detector frame through which I walk to reach my apartment has yet to detect a heavy brass door key and a pocketful of coins, but I'm not complaining.

Nor should the players. Special foods have been flown here from southern India to accommodate the more delicate English stomachs. Air-conditioning is perfect.

Laundry is returned on time.

Telephones work. It is a far cry from my first cricket tour here in 1964 when one slept sweltering under mosquito nets, encountered rats in hotel dining rooms and if you had any brains at all, one existed on a diet of bananas, hard boiled eggs and whiskey to avoid the dreaded Delhi Belly. On that visit, my late Daily Express friend Crawford White established the all-comers record of 23 loo visits in 24 hours.

Health consciousness is now so pronounced that all cigarettes and lighters are confiscated for the day at the gates. This doesn't disappoint many English visitors because there are so few here. Those not already deterred by the terrorism scares pulled out at the last moment when it seemed possible that this Test would not take place.

It was feared that the England team would return home following the BCCI's reigning president Jagmohan Dalmiya challenging the ICC's backing of Michael Denness over his actions as a match referee in South Africa. Denness dared to accuse Sachin Tendulkar, a deity here, of ball-tampering.

'We were expecting 5,000 English visitors,' said Bindra, who detests Dalmiya's arrogance, 'but I think that we now have only about 200 here.' That row was not only a disgrace but a phoney war from the start and has done much to revive Anglo-Indian antagonisms. The Test was always going to be played because India could not afford to lose the television revenue, but Dalmiya made himself a figure of national importance by contesting Denness's insistence on applying the ICC's rules to clean up the game.

An honourable man and former England captain, Denness returned home to cheers. Here in leader columns, feature articles, endless letters to newspapers and particularly in the sports pages, he has been so vilified as a postcolonial racist that he would make a fortune from libel actions if ever he could get a fair hearing. The hatred has been hysterical but, then, different moralities prevail.

Kapil Dev, India's cricketing icon before the rise of Tendulkar, is one of the players implicated in matchfixing allegations. A feature film being made about his life will not refer to it. 'My lawyers,' he says, 'told me that the accusations would take 20 years to come to court anyway.' This is a curious, lovable country, full of charm as well as bewildering anomalies. One is that since Michael Denness clamped down on Indian fielders' excessive appealing antics in recent years, they have already calmed down in this Test.

It is to be hoped that the Denness factor actually works and that the ICC will continue to support him.

The only pity is that England, after such an encouraging start here in Mohali, collapsed and now face a predictable beating. There's absolutely no point explaining to the Indian public that we don't have our strongest team here. That would be to insult them. I still find it unbelievable that anyone can refuse to play for England at anything when requested. Kipling got it right, but I suspect that certain players may never have heard of him.